You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!

Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.

Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.

Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

If you run into the above warning and are unable to get Opera installed the you should be aware of how Opera responded:

Quote:

this is not a change in policy, just a change in packaging. Opera often works on 'unsupported' distros because we have tried to design graceful fallbacks. For example Opera can do desktop environment integration but if the Gtk or KDE libs are too old it will fall back to its own styling. Additionally Opera's dependencies are minimal comparative to our major competitors. So all the policy really means is that we won't make major changes to accommodate those 'unsupported' distros. At the same time many users run on them and that is obviously fine by us.

As to what our 'support' policy is, it basically breaks down as follows. For the most part we consider distros supported as long as their upstream provider also providers support them, e.g. right now some of the older distros would be Debian 5.x, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, etc. However, one exception to this rule (as you have discovered) is that with 'Enterprise' distros we only support the latest version (not all the older supported versions). There are two reasons for this, firstly their libraries are often too old meaning they can't support Opera's full functionality (as it happens right now the only real downside on RHEL/Centos/Scientific 5.x is a lack of Gtk integration). Secondly, most desktop users will want to run the latest version of these Enterprise distros to allow them to run a bigger range of up to date desktop software. Sure, we realise that people such as yourself use Centos 5.x on the desktop but its biggest market is servers, where avoidance of updates is more critical. It is fairly trivial and relatively risk (and cost) free to update a desktop distro.

All that said, Opera will still run (often minus certain things like Gtk integration, HTML5 video support) on many older distros (I used Ubuntu 6.06 just last week and that distro was released on 1 June 2006), so for you this is only really a packaging issue.

Since we make a wider range of binary packages available than our competitors, with more flexible install options, you can still install and use Opera. You just have to switch to a non-native tar.bz2 package with the included install script. Or as I stated above, use a package created by the your distro or the community, just like you already do for probably ever other piece of software you have installed.

To work around XZ payloads just convert and repack it:
- D/L your preferred Opera RPM and store it in your ~/redhat/SOURCES directory,
- save the .spec file below as say "opera-11.60-1185_REPACK.spec",
- adjust the _buildarch %define is you're building for x64,
- run 'rpmbuild -bb opera-11.60-1185_REPACK.spec' and your new RPM is read for install.
* If your build process ends with "BAD MOVE!" that's a warning to not build packages as root.